How Paul Ryan Won the Recess

John McCormackThe Weekly Standard
4/30/2011

Did you hear the news? Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, the architect of the House Republicans’ budget, was booed! By his own constituents!

The video of said town hall booing was clipped by the liberal blog ThinkProgress, zipped around the Internet, and then moved up the conveyor belt to CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NBC’s Nightly News, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and other media outlets.

And so the “budget backlash” narrative began…

…The only problem with the backlash narrative is that it is wildly misleading. Despite efforts by labor unions and a variety of liberal activist organizations—One Wisconsin Now, MoveOn.org, Citizens Action of Wisconsin, Community for Change, etc.—to pack Ryan’s events with detractors and hecklers, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by his supporters.

At the 19 town hall meetings held over the course of two weeks, Ryan was praised much more frequently than he was heckled by attendees. Judging from applause versus boos this week, I didn’t witness a single event where Ryan had less than two-thirds of the crowd supporting him. Some constituents thanked Ryan for his “moral courage.”…

Ryan received another standing ovation in Racine on Friday, but that detail was left out of Politico‘s story. “Rep. Paul Ryan had local police remove a man from his town hall meeting Friday after he kept yelling about how Ryan’s budget plan would impact Medicare,” Politico reported from Racine. “It was the most dramatic moment yet in Ryan’s weeklong series of town halls, and it happened in one of the most Democratic areas of his district.”

Well, that’s a matter of opinion.

Was one man being escorted from a town hall meeting the “most dramatic moment” of the week? Or was it more dramatic when hundreds of senior citizens gave not one but two standing ovations to a politician proposing a bold Medicare reform? Again, it’s a matter of opinion. But the latter moment is a far more accurate depiction of what Ryan actually faced in his swing district these last two weeks….